 A couple nice clips from the show
 The music when you first reach Namek is beautiful

The Bad

 The story is an offense
 Gameplay is horrible
 Graphics are subpar
 Did I mention the story sucked?

Grade

F

Call it the whim of a silly girl. Who else would waste eight
hours of her life trying to disprove the legacy (no pun intended)
of bad DBZ games when ten minutes is more than enough to prove
that this game redefines bad? Who else would struggle through
this horrible, disgusting, wretched, evil excuse of a game
searching for a single redeeming feature? This game is so
bad that just writing about it makes me consider drowning
myself in the bowl of strawberry jello sitting beside me.
Let's look at it a bit closer, shall we?

I may as well cover the very little that's good. The game's
opening and ending have cool little clips from the show. Granted,
they're pixelated as hell, but I've seen worse. Peppered throughout
the game are screenshots from the show. They're cute, in a
nostalgia-inducing kind of way, but contribute little, as
the story is beyond the hope of any screenshot. The music
when you first arrive on Namek is sad and beautiful, and made
me want to cry. I actually wanted to cry many times while
playing this game, usually from desperate attempts to claw
my eyes out or in sorrow that the show I love was given a
game that doesn't even deserve the title of "game", so it
was nice to actually find a good thing about the game to cry
over. And that's about it for the good.

Now for the bad. The only problem is where to start! We'll
start with the most important aspect of any RPG: story. The
story of DBZ: Legacy of Goku is a shattered, unrecognizable
shell of the anime I so love. I could list every deviation
from the story, every senseless thing Goku does, and explain
why this shouldn't have been put there even though it is a
game and not the show, but that would take the whole review,
and there's more to a game than story. But this game truly
makes no sense. There's no explanation for what Goku does.
There are no connections. "Goku's son is kidnapped! Oh no!
Let's go home!" That's only one of the many, many, many parts
of this story that make no sense. If I hadn't watched these
episodes of the anime religiously for about seven years, I
would have no clue what the hell was going on. There is no
excuse for this.

You want me to tell you the gameplay is halfway decent? You
want me to lie to you? This game plays a lot like a GameBoy
Zelda game, actually. A butchered, no-fun version,
for sure, but that's all I can think to describe it as. In
this game, you have a total of four actions you can take in
battle: punch, energy beam, solar flare, and Kamehameha. Collision
detection is horrible in this game, so you have to be on top
of the thing before you can punch it. And a wolf at the beginning
of the game will tear you to shreds before you can get three
punches in. Solar flare doesn't stop an enemy for long enough
to be any good. Kamehameha takes a ton and a half of energy,
isn't as strong as the energy beam, and has Goku saying "Kamehame-Ha!".
No thanks. So that leaves the energy beam as your only weapon
against all the baddies. You can also only move or shoot in
four directions, limiting you further. And you can't run.
Unless a level up earns you some agility, you're the same
(slow) speed throughout the game. You can fly, but it just
looks like Goku is lying on his stomach. You have an amount
of "Flying Energy" that you refill by finding little bubbles
with a wing on them. Your energy runs out so fast, though,
and flying is so not fun, that you'll find yourself using
it only when you have no choice, like when running from a
boss that's WAY FASTER THAN YOU DESPITE A COUPLE HOURS
OF TRAINING FIGHTING AND DYING AGAINST STUPID DINOSAURS AND
****ING WOLVES WHEN YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE THE STRONGEST ****ING
MAN ON THE PLANET! And often it's almost impossible to
die in this game. Healing herbs are everywhere, especially
on the boss-battle arenas. It kind of makes me think the designers
had herbs on their minds far too often for comfort...

How about the graphics? They're all right. Goku's world is
bright and colorful, and doesn't look half bad, though it's
a little plain. The character sprites themselves are passable,
though sprites have been done better on the GameBoy. Character
faces (which show up next to the text they say) just look
horrible. They're blurry, deformed and hardly recognizable.
The graphics on this game do what they have to, but definitely
won't wow anyone.

Sound and audio? Maybe it won't suck? Please don't make me
laugh. Besides the one song I mentioned, the music in this
game is boring and repetitive. Also, once Goku learns Kamehameha
(from King Kai oddly enough), he says "Kamehame-Ha!" every
time you use that move. For that reason alone I never used
it.

Overall, this is a sucky game. There's no two ways around
it. The graphics are mediocre, the gameplay is utter crap,
sound and music are redundant and forgettable, and don't even
get me started on the story. And the powers that be have seen
fit to release a DBZ: Legacy of Goku 2. May God have
mercy on us all.

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